Paul Newman Retrospective

From 1969, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is one of the most enjoyable Westerns ever made. It looks back to classics of the form, but is very much a film of that counter-cultural era. Outlaws are the new heroes; and Butch (Newman) and Sundance (Robert Redford) are a pair of irresistible bandits, lovable rogues caught at the closing of the frontier. The system (railroads, banks, etc.) wants to exterminate these two; in a sense, the very terrain of West is shrinking around them--hence their final flight to South America. And yet they're able to laugh, and we're able to laugh with them, knowing they're the last of their kind. Katherine Ross is the girl between them. George Roy Hill directs from a script by William Goldman. (PG) BRIAN MILLER

Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1069, courtesy of 20th Century Fox.